Shocking Defeat Legacy / Real Life

---

Back to Shocking Defeat Legacy

---

Warfare

Classical Antiquity

• The Battle of Leuctra for Greece. Sparta was considered effectively invincible after centuries of reputation and their recent defeat of Athens. However, once Epaminondas applied this little thing called "proper tactics," the conservative Laconians lost a thousand of their elite, irreplaceable Spartiates (peers of the realm and citizens, trained for war from birth, allotted a landed estate from the public treasury upon achieving the age of majority, and of which there were never more than 8,000 even at the zenith of Sparta's power) in that single battle, and their reputation and hegemony over Greece both shattered forever.
  • And before that was the Pelopponesian War between Athens and Sparta. Athens' defeat spelled not only the end of its hegemony but also its democracy. Alexander the Great would spread Greek culture not under Athenian democracy but under Macedonian autocracy. Democracy would not be seen as a viable form of government until the Dutch Republic.
• From The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire:
  • The Battle of the Allia for Ancient Rome. The Gaulish chieftain Brennus defeated the Roman army and sacked Rome itself. The Romans were determined to never allow this to happen again, and strengthened the city's defences, reorganised the army and, for generations afterwards, marked the anniversary of the defeat by sacrificing the city's guard dogs as punishment for their failure to alert the Romans to a night attack on the Capitoline Hill. The sacred geese that did alert the Romans were carried through the city on gilded cushions in the same ceremony. As it happens, Rome would not be sacked again until 800 years later, the first time in 410 CE by Alaric I, then a second time in 455 CE, but at that time Rome had not been the capital of even the Western Empire for more than a 100 years (it was Ravenna, and before that it was Mediolanum).
  • The Punic Wars came close. In the first, the Romans lost two entire fleets in heavy storms, losing 280 ships and 100,000 men in 255 B.C. and a slightly smaller number in 253, yet they kept building new fleets and wrested naval supremacy from Carthage. In the Second Punic War, Hannibal and his army inflicted three terrible defeats on the Romans, but Rome continued to wage war until ultimate victory. Still the reaction to the loss of Cannae was desperate enough that Livy mentions that the Romans indulged in Human Sacrifice to the Gods: Two Gauls and two Greeks in male-female couples were buried alive in a stone chamber (normally used to bury alive as punishment Vestal Virgins who broke their vows of celibacy). So it was psychologically a huge blow, and it took a while for the Romans to come Back from the Brink.
  • Shortly after the Second Punic War came the destruction of Placentia, in no small part thanks to the Gauls doing so immediately after the Romans had deemed them pacified thanks to the defeats they had suffered late in the war for allying with Hannibal (in fact the Romans had just disbanded most of their northern army when the Gauls attacked). Then the Gauls attacked Placentia's twin city of Cremona to finish them off... And discovered they had just pissed the Romans off, with Cremona's defenses holding and the Roman reinforcements wiping the Gaulish army out.
  • The Lusitanian Wars brought the battle of Erisana, where the Lusitanian chieftain Viriathus humiliated Roman general Servilianus by pinning him down and forcing him to surrender in what had initially looked like the end of the rebellion. The additional fact that Viriathus compelled Servilianus to sign a peace treaty, which put an end to the war and elevated Viriathus to the diplomatic level of Hiero of Syracuse, was so humiliating for Rome that they called the subsequent peace period deformem pacem ("the abominable peace"). The situation got eventually solved when Servilianus's smarter brother Quintus Servilius Caepio bribed three of Viriathus's emissaries to murder him, but Rome never really got over the fact they had been forced to do through treason what they had failed to do on the battlefield. Most chroniclers abhorred Servilius's action, or at least pretended to, and some of them made up the Arc Words "Rome doesn't pay traitors" to make clear they would not have allowed it.
  • In the early imperial era, the most famous was the Battle of Teutoburg Forest on September 9, 9 AD. Three Roman legions were returning to camp when they were attacked by Arminius, a Germanic chieftain who had grown up in Rome. All three legions were wiped out, and eventually the Roman Empire withdrew from Germania. Emperor Augustus, when told of the disaster, as per Suetonius, banged his head against the wall, shouting "Varus! Give me back my legions!" went days without shaving in a Heroic BSoD and years after was known to mutter as a non-sequitur the same line, despite the fact that Varus had died in battle (mercifully since he didn't have to face Augustus in person). This defeat is often cited, especially in Romantic German nationalism as the real reason why the Romans never went further into Germania. Of course, the Romans did make excursions and expand there under Marcus Aurelius (a fact which The Philosopher King commemorates in a column showing him personally slaughter Germanic warriors) and there are some archaeological findings that suggest the Romans did try again but that defeat did endure in Rome's psyche.^note More recent research, e. g. the finding of the remains of a post 9 A. D. battlefield in the middle of Germania where the Romans conclusively defeated their Germanic foes, indicates that Rome continued to make successful incursions into Germania much longer than was hitherto believed and that the eventual withdrawal from there was, perhaps not directly preconditioned on the battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
• The Battle of Abritus, also known as the Battle of Forum Terebronii, occurred near Abritus (modern Razgrad in Bulgaria) in the Roman province of Moesia Inferior in the summer of 251. It was fought between the Romans and a federation of Gothic and Scythian tribesmen under the Gothic king Cniva. The Roman army of three legions was soundly defeated, and Roman emperors Decius and his son Herennius Etruscus were both killed in battle. They became the first Roman emperors to be killed by a foreign enemy. It was one of the worst defeats suffered by the Roman Empire against the Germanic tribes, rated by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus as on par with the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, the Marcomannic invasion of Roman Italy in 170, and the Battle of Adrianople in 378.
  • The defeat was a disaster for Rome. The emperors' deaths led to more political instability at home; and the loss of the three legions allowed repeated barbarian incursions in the region for the next two decades.

The new Roman emperor Trebonianus Gallus was forced to allow the Goths to return home with their loot and prisoners. The barbarians would not be expelled from Roman territory until Claudius II Gothic's victorious campaign in 271.

• The Battle of Adrianople in 378 AD was this for the late Roman Empire. Emperor Valens led an army of 20,000 Goths to put an end to the uprising that had plagued the region for two years, and decided to attack them immediately instead of waiting for the Western Roman Emperor Gratian, as he was jealous of Gratian's successes in the Western Roman Empire. The battle was a disaster, with Emperor Valens killed, two thirds of the Roman army destroyed, and the Goths free to pillage as they went. While Rome had suffered bad defeats before, the aftermath showed that Rome could no longer impose treaties on barbarians as they used to, as the Goths were given a de facto kingdom in Thrace and were never assimilated. As a result, many historians now believe Adrianople marked the start of the problems that would ultimately destroy the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. Not long after Valens died the cause of Arian Christianity in the Roman East was to come to an end. His successor Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state religion of Rome and suppressed the Arians. The Arian Christianity retained its solid foothold in East Germanic nations: Goths (Visigoths and Ostrogoths),Vandals, Burgundians, Svevi, Langobards; who entered the provinces of the Western Roman Empire and began founding their own kingdoms there.
  • The long-term implications of the battle of Adrianople for the art of war have often been overstated, with many 20th-century writers repeating Sir Charles Oman's idea that the battle represented a turning point in military history, with heavy cavalry triumphing over Roman infantry and ushering in the age of the medieval knight. This idea was disputed by T. S. Burns in 1973. According to Burns, the Gothic army's cavalry arm was fairly small, that Valens would actually have had more cavalry and that while the role of Fritigern's cavalry was critical to his victory, the battle was a mainly infantry versus infantry affair. The medieval knight was not to rise for several centuries after Adrianople.
• The real humiliating defeats for Rome came against the Persian Empires. Rome and the Parthians and later the Sassanians had a Forever War that lasted 683 years, the longest protracted conflict between two powers, and that ended when the Arabs came out of nowhere and took out the Sassanians.
  • The first and most humiliating one was the Battle of Carrhae, where triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus (the guy who crushed Spartacus) invaded the Parthian Empire. He had a solidly equipped army and greatly outnumbered the Parthians, yet the latter's horse archers and kataphracts utterly outmaneuvered the Romans in the battle, who were forced to attack them in spite of the difficulty of catching them while mostly on foot due to the Parthians' gigantic baggage train constantly supplying them with more arrows. The Parthians brutally crushed the Romans with supposedly 60% of their forces being killed or captured, Crassus was murdered and depending on which account you believe, molten gold was poured into his mouth or he was beheaded and his head was used as a prop for a Persian production of Euripides's Bacchae (Crassus was apparently the head of King Pentheus in what we can assume was a rather intensely realistic production).
  • The Romans were especially upset that the Persians captured their Eagle standards and Julius Caesar planned to invade there to get it back, but he got assassinated. Mark Antony decided to launch the invasion later and he also got defeated, worse than Crassus (albeit not in the same numbers), and Augustus used Antony's defeat to forge a peace treaty with the Parthians and managed to get the Eagles back to Rome, which boosted his popularity. It was such a huge deal for him that he built statues to commemorate it. He also minted coins showing a Persian soldier kneeling submissively which needless to say didn't happen but obviously was important for the Romans to believe.
  • Then there was the famous incident where Emperor Valerian lost to them in the Battle of Edessa and ended up becoming the first Emperor to be captured alive and imprisoned by an enemy power. Valerian spent the remainder of his life in captivity and according to Roman legend was either made to serve as a footstool to King Shapur of Persia and/or given the Crassus-esque molten gold treatment. The Persians denied that they killed him however. Another one was the Emperor Julian the Apostate who led another invasion into Persian land, supposedly to imitate Alexander the Great. Julian had some successes early on and laid siege on the capital of Ctesiphon before being killed by a Persian spear (of if you believe conspiracy theories, fragged by one of his own Christian soldiers because they didn't like his pagan-revival policies). In either case, the death of the Emperor and Head of State with his army in enemy territory was a major embarrassment, and his successor Jovian more or less negotiated a sweetheart deal for the Persians to get himself and the army safe-passage, which made him so widely hated in Rome that his own uncle was lynched the day it was announced.
• The Romans had been slowly taking more and more control over Judea for a century or two, but the Jewish Revolts, especially the fall of Jerusalem, and later Masada and Beitar, were the final nail in the coffin of an independent Judea. The Romans destroyed the Temple, fundamentally changing the nature of Judaism, and there wouldn't be a Jewish state in the Land of Israel until 1948.
• The Battle of Red Cliffs, as it's widely believed that if the aggressors hadn't been defeated, the Three Kingdoms period might have ended then and there, which would have had a drastic impact on China's history.
• The Battle of Fei River. Had Jin lost, the Han Chinese could have lost control of China, however, Xie An (who was famous as a great administrator and had little military experience) decided he wasn't going to let Former Qin run wild and beat back a far more experienced army well over twice the size of his own. It was the single largest catalyst in the fall of Former Qin and just ten years later practically ceased to exist.

Middle Ages

• English, and by extension, British, history contains a few examples:
  • The Battle of Stamford Bridge, where the Anglo-Saxons faced off against the Vikings led by the fearsome Harold Hadrada supported by disgruntled English nobility. The Anglo-Saxons won and Hadrada was slain, marking the beginning of the end for Viking power in Western Europe.
  • The Battle of Hastings, fought almost right after Stamford bridge, wherein William the Conqueror defeated King Harold and brought Anglo-Saxon dominance of England to an end, while ushering in the rule of the Normans.
  • The Battle of Bannockburn, when a small Scottish army handily defeated a far larger English Army, the resulting humiliation officially broke the centuries long English hegemony over Scotland, something that was only somewhat reestablished when both kingdoms were diplomatically unified by King James VI of Scotland (and I of England) some 300 years later.
• The Battle of Bouvines was another major defeat. The French King Philip II Augustus defeated a coalition of England, HRE and Flanders and King John of England's defeat was used by the Barons as a motivation for forcing him to sign the Magna Carta. The defeat spelled the end of the Angevin Empire — later Plantagenets were reclaim portions of the lands of Henry II, but they would never reclaim the entire thing.

Having lost all credibility as emperor following the battle, Otto IV was deposed by Pope Innocent III, leading to Frederick I Barbarossa's grandson (and king of Sicily!) Frederick II's accession to the Imperial throne.Otto IV remained the only German king of the Welf dynasty.

• By the end of his reign, in 1223, French king Philip II August had not only laid the foundations for the era of Capetian pre-eminence in Europe which followed and marked much of the Late Middle Ages, but also those of the absolutism that came to define the Ancien Régime .

• The Battle of Hattin 1187 to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which wiped out almost the whole army of the kingdom. It led to the downfall of Jerusalem itself. Never again were the Franks on offensive at Outremer anymore after the defeat at Hattin.
• The Mongols have done this a lot to others: they conquered China, decimated Persia, ravaged Russia, and nearly conquered Europe. For Russians especially, the Mongol attack on Kievan Rus' is cited as one of the major reasons for why Russians are backward compared to Europe.
• The Siege of Baghdad in particular comes to mind; contrary to popular belief regarding The Crusades, the Mongols actually harmed the Islamic world much worse than the Crusaders themselves by destroying their spiritual center and it was considered in the Shia view that no worse calamity since Huseyn's death in the Battle of Karbala has taken place. The city's resulting loss ended the Arabs' power as caliphs, reducing them to powerless figureheads and eventually vassals to the Turks, who filled the power vacumm left by their loss with the emerging Ottoman Empire.
• The Byzantine Empire periodically came Back from the Brink after major defeats and setbacks, until of course they stopped doing that in the 1450s. One especially famous one was the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, when the Seljuk Turks routed the much larger Roman army and captured Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes. What was particularly surprising was that the Sultan Alp-Arslan hadn't even intended to fight the Byzantine Empire, being more concerned with fighting Egypt, and was very surprised when he realised he'd captured the Emperor, releasing him not long afterwards (though the Emperor's capture gave an opportunity for his stepson's family to depose him). While modern scholars don't consider it a "turning point" anymore, the disaster at Manzikert led to the loss of most of Anatolia (some parts of which irrevocably) and plunging the Empire into a series of civil wars. Until the end of the Empire in 1453 Manzikert was widely known as "that day" and considered one of the most shameful days of the Eastern Roman Empire. The other is the Fourth Crusade but that isn't considered a defeat so much as appalling and disgusting treachery and sneak attacks on the part of the Latins and Venetian Crusaders (albeit inspired by their own anti-Latin and anti-Venetian policies).
  • Battle of Manzikert indirectly, on the the long run, paved the way for
    The Crusades .
  • On the European side of the Empire, the Battle of Pliska in 811 against the First Bulgarian Empire. The Bulgars had been more or less tolerated, since the Byzantines had their hands full with the Abassaid Caliphate. However, with the Abbassids in a civil war, Emperor Nikephorus I "the Logothete" launched an invasion to reintegrate Bulgaria into the empire. After sacking the capital Pliska, Nikephorus delayed the army's march, allowing the Bulgarian Khan Krum to launch a surprise attack on the strung out Byzantine army in the mountain passes. Nikephorus I and his son was killed, the entire army was destroyed, and Bulgaria would remain independent for another two centuries. Pliska was the first time a Byzantine Emperor had been killed in battle since Emperor Valens at Adrianople five centuries ago, and the Byzantines would not cross the Balkan Mountains until the 970s when they had no other choice, and while Byzantium would suffer other severe defeats at the hands of the Bulgarians, none of them would shock the empire so profoundly as the debacle at Pliska.

Renaissance Era

• The Loire Campaign in The Hundred Years War. Before it, everyone knew that English conquest of France was just a question of time, and the imminent conquest of Orléans would speed up things. Then the French, their courage restored by Joan of Arc, lifted the siege, launched the campaign and inflicted the English a series of defeats, the final of which, the Battle of Patay, being a Curb-Stomp Battle that crippled the English army for the rest of the war. Indeed, a major bone for contention in the Wars of the Roses and well in the early years of The House of Tudor was "Who lost France?" and when are they going to get their Angevin territories back. It wasn't until The French Revolution, where the English decided they hated radicalism more than the French King that they realized they should stop asserting their claim on the latter's crown, that they got out of The Remnant of that revanchism.
  • The Battle of Castillion, the final battle of the Hundred Years War in 1453, also fits the description. By 1452, England had been thrown out of France aside from Calais, and the main priority was to fortify that one region, and keep an eye over the channel. However, the people of Gascony, who had been part of England since 1154 because of the rise of the Plantagenet dynasty, saw themselves as English subjects and urged Henry VI to recapture the province. John Talbot was sent with an army in 1452, which took the French by surprise, having expected a possible invasion to come in Normandy. The following year, the English were utterly crushed by the French artillery, Talbot was killed, an entire army was thrown away, and the battle directly contributed to Henry's mental breakdown, directly resulting in the War of the Roses.
• The Battle of Mohács in 1526. The battle saw the last attempt of the Kingdom of Hungary to keep the Ottoman Empire out of central Europe utterly crushed by Suleiman the Magnificent, with the death of the last Jagellion king of Hungary and an essential end of Hungary as an independent nation: The Kingdom was quickly partitioned between an Ottoman part and an Austrian part (and an Eastern Hungarian Puppet State of the Ottomans) and would go on to become a massive battleground between the House of Osman and the House of Habsburg for the next 300 or so years. The Hungarian saying "Több is veszett Mohácsnál" ("More was lost at Mohács") essentially means "things can always get worse than this".
• The Battle of Chaldiran for Shah Ismail I of Persia. At just 14 years of age, he founded the Safavid Empire, established Shia Islam as Persia's state religion (which would continue to this day in modern Iran) and was considered an invincible conqueror. When he faced the Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim, not only were his forces defeated, but his capital city was pillaged and his favorite wife and entire harem were captured by Selim. Ismail's aura of invincibility was shattered and he retreated from any more military campaigns or any sorts of state affairs, becoming an alcoholic as result, despite it being forbidden in Islam, he just didn't care anymore. Ismail died at a relatively young age of 36 likely of a broken heart. It was believed by contemporary scholars that if he had won, the Turks would have been unable of conquering Mecca and Medina from the Mamluks and emerging as a caliphate of their own right. As Venetian ambassador Caterino Zeno claims:
  If the Turks had been beaten in the battle of Chaldiran, the power of Ismail would have become greater than that of Tamerlane, as by the fame alone of such a victory he would have made himself absolute lord of the East.
• The Battle of Lepanto and the Siege of Vienna of 1682 for the Ottoman Empire: the near complete destruction of their fleet and the loss of all their experienced crews at Lepanto signaled the end of the Ottoman supremacy over the Mediterranean (the fleet was quickly rebuilt in terms of ships, but the crews weren't even half as competent as their predecessors, and the Ottoman fleet never recovered), and the defeat at Vienna marked the end of the Ottoman expansion in Europe.
• The Battle of Ksar El Kebir in 1578 was this for the Portuguese Empire. With the empire already becoming stagnant, a massive fortune was then spent in amassing one of the largest and most well equiped land armies in Europe at the time, in an attempt by the young Portuguese king to expand their holdings in North Africa. However, they were met by the Moors and their Ottoman allies, who vastly outnumbered them. The Portuguese army fought valiantly, but was utterly crushed, the king missing or dead, and thousands of noblemen made prisoner. Another vast fortune was spent ransoming them back, and, since the king had disappeared without producing an heir, shortly after the country was taken over by the Spanish in a Personal Union, which lasted for sixty years, during which Portugal could only watch as they further lost a great amount of power, colonies, and influence. By the time they got their independence back, the other nations of Europe, with their superior economies and manpower, were well underway in their own discovery and colonisation efforts, and for Portugal there was no going back to their former glory.
• The Deluge is this for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Swedish Kingdoms and Russia unleashed a level of destruction there comparable to the Thirty Years' War, and completely destroyed 188 cities and towns, 81 castles, and 136 churches in Poland, and leading to the loss of 1/3 of its population, the utter destruction of Warsaw, and the permanent loss of several pieces of Polish cultural artwork. Much of the country was looted by the Swedes, with these stolen artifacts being museum pieces in the country to this day. Moreover, it was the end of Poland's status as the superpower of Eastern Europe, giving way to Sweden briefly. And a hundred years later, the Kingdom would be erased from the map in a series of partitions by Austria, Prussia, and Russia.
• The battle of Curalaba in 1598 was this for the Spanish Crown regarding the Arauco War. In December 21, a band of Mapuches ambushed and killed the Spanish Governor and all his peerage. News of this attack spread like wildfire among the mapuche population, leading to the Third Great Mapuche Rebellion that culminated in the Destruction of the Seven Cities where all the Spanish settlements founded south of the Bio-Bio River were burned to the ground. This dealt a fatal blow to Spain's effort of conquering the South of Chile, effectively marking the end the compaign. It was decided the best course of action was just to establish a frontier using the previously mentioned river as a natural barrier. Worth noting this wasn't the end of the war, as conflicts continued at irregular intervals during the Chilean War of Independence and the War of the Pacific. It wasn't until the Occupation of the Araucanía in 1883 that the conflict was brought to an end.
• The Battle of Kinsale in Ireland in 1601 was a defeat for the Irish rebel The Earl of Tyrone. He then fled Ireland and left his province of Ulster to be resettled by Scottish Protestants. This new Protestant region in Ireland would remain loyal to Britain and led to Ireland's partition in the 20th century.

18th Century

• The defeat and death of Carolus Rex in The Great Northern War was this for Sweden and others who keep lamenting What Might Have Been had he not died. This was also the end of Sweden as a great power in Central-Eastern Europe, while it marked the rise of Russia under Peter the Great as the hegemon of Eastern Europe (a position it enjoys to this day).
• The Battle of Quiberon Bay during the Seven Years' War effectively bankrupted the French government by causing a credit crunch (because financiers realized that the British could strike French trade at will). They still hadn't paid the debts off by the time of the Revolution, nearly fifty years later.
• For the Jacobites (supporters of the exiled Stuart monarchs), the Battle of Culloden was this. It was the penultimate and biggest Jacobite uprising with the largest ghost of a chance and the defeat led to a brutal Hanoverian campaign against the Highlands, including legislation proscribing Highland dress.
• The Mughal Empire never recovered from Nader Shah's invasion of India in the 1730s-1740s. It culminated in the sack of Delhi which led to the Persians stealing the Peacock Throne of the Emperor and the famous Koh-I-Noor diamond (which would then pass to the Afghanis, then to the Sikh Empire of Raja Ranjit Singh, and finally to the British who keep it to this day - to much gritting of teeth). Other defeats, like the Maratha Confederacy's loss at the Third Battle of Panipat, the 1757 Battle of Plassey which the East India Company won and defeated the Nawab of Bengal endure as marks of bitterness among Indians about the failure of local rulers to effectively mount a challenge against the British.

19th Century

• During The Napoleonic Wars:
  • The Battle of Austerlitz. The armies of Russia and the Holy Roman Empire seemed to have Napoleon cornered, at the end of his supply lines, and overwhelmingly outnumbered. However, Alexander I of Russia decided to fight against everybody else's advice. Napoleon proceeded to absolutely crush the Third Coalition, destroying a quarter of the entire army, and leaving pretty much ending the War of the Third Coalition then and there. The battle marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire which had lasted for a whole millennium, as Francis I had no choice but to abolish it because the majority of its territories were in French hands. Furthermore, any chance of possibly undoing the liberal reforms of the French Revolution in the lands of Western Europe already under French control, such as Italy or Holland and some parts of Germany was now impossible, with many of these regions having experienced technical independence from their Austrian overlords for two whole decades, and Austria would find itself bogged down in several rebellions against these regions when they regained them a decade later.
  • The Battle of Jena-Auerstädt. The Prussian army had been considered the finest in Europe ever since the wars of Frederick the Great, its soldiers inculcated with 'corpse discipline'-should they be shot and killed, their corpse should continue to march, load, and fire regardless. While Napoleon pounced with his main force on a Prussian detachment at Jena, the Iron Marshal Davout threw back the Prussian main army with a single corps. The Prussian army had been shattered in a matter of hours, and the pursuit destroyed it and the Prussian state with it. In the wake of this defeat, Prussia was forced to accept the loss of half its population and restrictions on its military. The defeat was so extreme, the Prussians basically rebuilt their society to recover and defeat the French. In the military, the corporal punishment necessary for 'corpse discipline' was abolished, and the concept of a citizen army was embraced. The Prussians adopted the first modern general staff, allowing non-aristocrats to become professional staff officers. They even went so far as to abolish serfdom to make a society that could defeat Napoleon.
  • Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia. The French Grande Armée, with over 680,000 soldiers, was the largest army ever fielded at that point. Knowing that they couldn't take on such a large army directly, the Russians instead avoided engaging directly, instead retreating and relying on scorched earth tactics and guerrilla warfare to wear the French down and deny them supplies. Napoleon eventually took Moscow, but failed to destroy the Russian army, and with winter setting in, they were eventually forced to retreat. In the end, only about 27,000 French soldiers made it out, with Napoleon (and France's) reputation severely damaged.
  • The Battle of Trafalgar became this for the Combined Navies in the Napoleonic Wars - the French and Spanish lost almost seven times as many men as the British, and the majority of their active ships-of-the-line. Not only would they never challenge the British at sea again, it gave the British the ability to strike at will at French and Spanish trade, contributing directly to the collapse of both empires by slowly throttling their treasuries. Indeed, when Napoleon was presented with an embroidery of an Eagle strangling a Lion, he said that it should be the other way round. During the battle itself, the explosion of the Achille was what signaled the end of the engagement and convinced the Franco-Spanish fleet to run.
  • The Battle of Bailén - the Spanish destroyed three French divisions. Unfortunately, it was so shocking...that Napoleon turned up to sort the mess out in person, and promptly sent Spain into retreat. Even then, although Napoleon sent the Spanish into retreat, it was the first clear defeat of a major French army since he came to power, which (along with the defense of Saragossa) encouraged his enemies to continue their fight. Thus not only did the French army find itself stuck in a bloody war on the Iberian Peninsula for the next six years, but Austria started another war in the following year (1809), leading to the first defeat of an Army led by Napoleon in person at Aspern.
  • Napoleon's invasion of Russia followed by the Battle of Leipzig led L'Empereur to Abdicate the Throne, which thanks to Bourbon incompetence led to The Hundred Days, which ended with Waterloo. As with many battles, what gave Waterloo such a "knock-out blow" mystique was not the battle itself but the subsequent pursuit. Thus in 1815, unlike 1812/13 and 1813/14, Napoleon's army was not given time to regroup and replenish. Waterloo led to France being occupied by the Congress Powers for five years (the longest until World War II) and it would be the end of the Anglo-French Rivalry, decisively in favor of the English.
• The entire First Opium War was this to China. China's capitulation and the total lack of any Curb Stomp Cushion in sight humbled the Chinese and marked the beginning of an era of being forced to negotiate from a position of weakness, and ending China's belief that it was the Middle Kingdom without a peer, with total hegemony over other nations. They even came up with the term Unequal Treaty to describe the treaties that resulted from these losses. Even in contemporary China, it's still invoked with anger as is the Six-Nation Army's sack and looting of China in the Boxer Rebellion and the defeat to Japan in the First Sino Japanese War.
• The entire First Anglo-Afghan War, after establishing dominion over India, the British Empire launched an invasion of the Emirate of Kabul with a modern army along with a sizable Indian auxiliary force. Much to the surprise of absolutely everyone, said army was bogged down by logistical difficulties and Afghan guerrilla fighters, it was eventually forced to retreat a few years later, resulting in the loss of practically all their troops and accompanying civilians, with only a single British soldier and a handful of Indian sepoys making it back to safety in Jalalabad. The psychological scar this defeat left in the British Empire was such that, despite a British Force ultimately demolishing Kabul in a punitive expedition, they promptly retreated back to India.
• The Battle of the Alamo, which was a major defeat for the Republic of Texas. Subverted and completely reversed in that the Alamo actually fulfilled its objectives. While a tactical defeat, it was a resounding strategic victory that not only severely bled out the Mexican Army and allowed the Texan Army to organize into a fighting force, but also provided substantial morale boost. The men of the Alamo had actually been ordered by Sam Houston to leave—Bowie's men originally came to destroy the fort, but the defenders chose to stay. Perhaps a better example from that war is the Battle of San Jacinto, where the relatively ragtag and much smaller Texan army hid out in the swamplands near what is now Houston, and defeated Santa Anna's men in a completely unexpected attack.
• The Eureka Rebellion, in which miners attempted to rebel over taxation and got curbstomped by the redcoats, is seen as a galvanising point for Australian nationalism. The Eureka Flag itself is still flown alongside the current Australian flag, and is far and away the strongest contender for a potential new national flag. It's eagerly been adopted by Republicans and patriots, the union movement, sporting clubs, and more controversially both the far left and the far right (it's the only thing that they can agree on). To be fair, it's a very nice-looking flag.
• While the Battle of Gettysburg is popularly considered the turning point of the American Civil War, many however actually see the Battle of Antietam as the real turning point of the war, because this was the last real chance the Confederacy had of not just temporarily carrying the war north (there was also a Southern offensive in the west at the time, while even if Gettysburg had been won by Lee, Vicksburg still would have fallen to Grant), but also to gain recognition from the major European powers. Gettysburg had essentially no impact on the long term reputation of Lee and his army; the Northern public and the South alike considered him undefeated when Grant began his offensive in 1864.
  • Even after Gettysburg, the South still had one last chance to win, or at the very least, get a negotiated peace that would leave the Confederacy intact. That would be by keeping Union forces stalemated in sieges until November 1864, when the Northern public, sick of a long, bloody war with no end in sight, would vote Lincoln out of office and elect George McClellan President, who was campaigning on a Peace platform. In the east, Grant's forces were held at bay at Petersburg while in the west, Sherman's forces were tied up in the siege of Atlanta. But Atlanta fell to Sherman's forces in early September, boosting Northern morale and resulting in Lincoln getting re-elected. When Atlanta fell, everyone knew the South had truly lost.
  • The fall of Petersburg caused the Confederacy to realize that their capital of Richmond would soon fall as well, which eventually lead the engagement at the Appomattox Court House and General Lee's surrender to Grant.
• For Tsarist Russia, the Crimean War was this. It proved how backward Russia was from England and France and while that war was famed for incompetence on all sides and created many reforms in the armies of Western Europe, in Russia, it finally convinced the autocratic Empire to *gasp* abolish serfdom and tentatively go on the path to liberal reforms.
• The Second Schleswig War of 1864 is this for Denmark, and would come to shape both the general Danish foreign policy and view on warfare for least the next century, if not still affecting it to some degree today. The Danish army was poised against the Prussian Army and the Austrian Army, which were superior in both manpower and technology. The leading Danish politicians knew that the war was likely, but was not overly concerned about it at first. They had thought that the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was personally uninterested in a war (but this was what Bismarck wanted them to think; in actually Bismarck wanted a war for internal political reasons), and even if it came to a war they were hopeful about the prospect to rallying either English or Swedish support to the Danish cause. But then Bismarck's diplomatic trap sprung and now the Prussian government were openly agitating for war, and England and Sweden declared that they had no interest in intervening, and as such the Danes were rather hopelessly alone in their fight. Though much of the country was ignited with Patriotic Fervor, the more pragmatic members of the Danish government more or less knew that that they had no real chance of actually winning the war, but had hoped to at least put up a successful enough defensive war to fight the Prussians and their Austrian allies to a standstill and eventually sue for a lenient peace deal. These hopes were eventually completely crushed when the Prussian forces won two definitive victories in the spring of 1864, first in the "Battle of Dybbøl" and then in the "Battle of Als". Denmark eventually had to limp to the negotiating table and accept a very harsh peace deal, ceding a sizeable chunk of the country, and was as a result thrown into a downright existential crisis as a nation. Denmark basically hit rock bottom, with the King even secretly entertaining the prospect of Denmark simply surrending its independence and becoming a part of Germany. Henceforth Danish foreign policy would be dictated by the view that Denmark simply could not muster an army large enough to successfully defend its territory, especially should it come to a war with Germany, and that armed resistance in such a scenario was only going to amount a needless waste of Danish lives. It also informed a view that warfare was simply not a viable political tool to enforce Danish ambitions, and that diplomacy and careful appeasement of Denmark's neighbors should be the way forward. The most tangible effects of the defeat was without a doubt the Danish government's decision to remain neutral throughout World War I, and to peacefully surrender to Nazi Germany when they invaded the country during World War II. Danish armed forces would in fact not participate in any official military operations on foreign soil for well over a century, until the NATO-lead interventions in the Kosovo War in 1999.
• A minor, but still notable case: The James-Younger Gang's raid on the bank in Northfield, Minnesota on September 7th, 1876. Three members of the gang entered the bank and demanded the clerks open the safe, but were told it was locked. One member ordered Joseph Lee Haywood to open the safe, and murdered Haywood when he refused. Haywood's Heroic Sacrifice gave the locals time to arm themselves and launch an attack, driving the James-Younger gang out of town and leaving two of their number dead in the street. This was the beginning of the end for the gang, with the Younger brothers nabbed in the ensuing manhunt. Jesse and Frank James escaped, but never returned to prominance again.
• The Franco-Prussian War is what named the concept of revanchism. The Prussians' victory at Sedan, their capture of Head-of-State Napoleon III and them using the Palais de Versailles for the founding of Imperial Germany alongside the taking of territories of Alsace and Lorraine created kvetching like you can't believe. School-children were taught geography about missing territories and how when they grow up they are going to get it back. It also led to the Paris Commune which was brutally suppressed and more or less ended monarchism in France with even conservatives agreeing to be a Republic. It was the permanent end of France in favor of Germany as Continental Europe's great power.
• For Italy's colonial ambitions in East Africa it was Adwa. Before, Ethiopia was considered doomed to fall and become an outright colony after their rebellion at being scammed into becoming a protectorate was suppressed in blood-and then the Italian invasion army was wiped out thanks to a combination of bad Italian leadership, Ethiopian numerical superiority and the Ethiopian best troops being actually better armed than the Italians through sheer cunning (before trying to take his country's independence back, emperor Menelik had used the credits he had thanks to his treaty with the Italians to buy weapons from Italy and got the latest models, while the Italian force was armed with weapons slated to be phased out soon). Italy would not make another attempt at Ethiopia until 1936, and they were still so shocked they started using chemical weapons the moment it looked the ailing Ethiopian forces were preparing a comeback.

Early 20th Century

• The disasters that were the Battles of Mukden and Tsushima were largely responsible for the Tsarist government to fold the Russo-Japanese War, despite the still enormous strategic advantage and intelligence reporting of the impending collapse of the Japanese economy. The sense of national shame still felt forty years later was one of the major reasons the Soviet Union agreed to join the war against Japan in the closing days of WWII, despite technically still being neutral^note The details of the non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Empire of Japan said that it would lose power only a year after its denunciation or non-prolongation, which happened in the Spring of '45.
  • The complete victory of the Japanese military surprised international observers and transformed the balance of power in both East Asia and Europe, resulting in Japan's emergence as a great power and a decline in the Russian Empire's prestige and influence in Europe. Russia's incurrence of substantial casualties and losses for a cause that resulted in humiliating defeat contributed to a growing domestic unrest which culminated in the 1905 Russian Revolution ( and indirectly to February and October Revolution in 1917), and severely damaged the prestige of the Russian autocracy.
  • Certainly the Japanese success increased self-confidence among anti-colonial nationalists in colonised Asian countries – Vietnamese, Indonesians, Indians and Filipinos – and to those in declining countries like the Ottoman Empire and Persia in immediate danger of being absorbed by the Western powers. It also encouraged the Chinese who, despite having been at war with the Japanese only a decade before, still considered Westerners the greater threat. As Sun Yat-sen commented, "We regarded that Russian defeat by Japan as the defeat of the West by the East. We regarded the Japanese victory as our own victory".
  • To the Western powers, Japan's victory demonstrated the emergence of a new Asian regional power. With the Russian defeat, some scholars have argued that the war had set in motion a change in the global world order with the emergence of Japan as not only a regional power, but rather, the main Asian power. The US and Australian reaction to the changed balance of power brought by the war was mixed with fears of a Yellow Peril eventually shifting from China to Japan.
• Italy's defeat at Gasr Bu Hadi in 1915 saw the Italians expelled from most of Libya and reduced to a few coastal cities, as now not only the rebels knew they could defeat the Italians in a pitched battle but, due the Italian commander's arrogance, had managed to capture thousands of rifles dozens of machine guns, and even some artillery, all with plentiful ammunition. On the long run it backfired on the entire Libyan population, as when they counterattacked the Italians first shattered the main rebel forces and then defeated the guerilla by taking in hostage most of the civilian population to isolate the rebels from support (also killing many civilians from starvation due the Italians not caring much of keeping them fed), but said counterattack was so ferocious because the Italians still felt the sting of Gasr Bu Hadi (and actually made a point of luring a rebel force there to annihilate it just to avenge that defeat), and it only came in 1923-one year after Benito Mussolini took over in Italy.

World War I

• The Battle of Tannenberg is considered the worst Russian defeat in the war. Over 170,000 Russians were killed or captured, with their general choosing to commit suicide rather than have to face Tsar Nicholas over it.
• Gallipoli for Australia and New Zealand. It's viewed in much the vein as Dunkirk for the UK, only more so. Temporary Setback for Winston Churchille, then Lord of Admiralty; beginning of Mustafa Kemal Pasha Atatürk rise to power , who overthrew Ottoman Dynasty & Caliphate and founded secular Republic of Turkey.
• The First Day of the Battle of the Somme continues to remain in the cultural memory for Britain. The British Generals attempted to launch a major offensive in the Somme River region of the Western Front in Summer 1916, both to make a breakthrough of the German Lines and to provide relief for the French fighting in the vicious Battle of Verdun. After over a week of artillery bombardment at the German Lines, the British then launched their assault on the morning of July 1st. However, the shelling failed to destroy the German Forces (who were protected via underground bunkers throughout the line), and when the assault commenced, the British Forces were devastated by German Artillery & Machine Gun fire. The First Day of the Somme was the single bloodiest day in British Military history, with over 57,000 Casualties (including more than 19,000 Killed) on July 1st alone, while also failing to meet any of their first-day objectives. The sheer amount of losses that day remains a source of grief for much of the British People. To make matters worse, the Battle would still rage on until November 1916, thereby inflicting even more losses for the British Army.
  • The Canadian Province of Newfoundland was especially affected by the First Day of the Somme. At the time, Newfoundland formed the 1st Newfoundland Regiment to fight in the war.^note  Newfoundland had a small population of 240,000 at the outbreak of WW1, so the Regiment contained a sizeable portion of it's total combat force, especially since at the time the province was independent from Canada but still part of the British Empire. On July 1st, 1916, the 1st Regiment, who had largely limited combat experience, had been assigned to the Somme to serve as a rear-trench support unit. However, an hour after the fateful British Assault began, they were ordered to move forward to the front line and assault the German trenches. With the British support & communication trenches congested with dead & wounded, the Regiment opted to climb & go on the surface to get to the front... which left them in plain view of German Machine Guns all while being trapped by their own barbed wire. In just 20 minutes, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment was wiped out, suffering a casualty rate of 93%, most of whom were killed-in-action before reaching their own front line. ^note  Of the 780 Regiment Men who were present before July 1st, only 110 survived that day, of whom only 68 were uninjured & available the following day. The loss still casts a shadow in the cultural memory of Newfoundlanders; since the regiment consisted of so many of their young men, not only was the province affected by the great sense of loss, but also led to a decline in the region's economic development with so many working-age men killed.
• During the Russian Civil War, Kolchak's defeat at Tobol was the turning point for the Whites to start losing. After that defeat, Kolchak's Eastern White army started a retreat that quickly escalated to panicked flight resulting in the fall of Omsk, the rebellion at Irkutsk and Admiral Kolchak's own demise. For Denikin's Southern White army, the failure of his Moscow offensive at the battle of Orel was such a defeat; after Tobol and Orel the Reds had a practically guaranteed win, and the rest of the war was basically cleanup of remnant Whites, Blacks and Greens.
• The sinking of the SMS Szent István during World War I was this for the Austro-Hungarian Navy. Before that, the Austro-Hungarians had tried various times to break the Otranto Barrage. Then the Szent István, the flagship of the fleet, was sunk by two Italian torpedo boats that just happened to be in the area, and not only the attack the flagship was supposed to lead was canceled, but the Austro-Hungarian navy didn't dare to leave the ports anymore.
  • Not that there was much time left for another attempt - the Szent István was sunk on 10 June 1918, less than five months before the land battle of Vittorio Veneto which forced Austria-Hungary to sue for peace.
• Subverted by the Battle of Caporetto of World War I. While 'Caporetto' is still synonymous with 'complete and utter defeat' in Italian and the Italian Army was forced to cede half of Veneto to the Austro-Hungarian invasion, the Italian soldiers, upon noticing the civilians were running from the invaders, rallied up at the Piave river and stopped any attempt to pass it for a year. One year later, the Battle of Vittorio Veneto was one for the Austro-Hungarians: while the Austro-Hungarian Army quickly recovered from being dissolved (as pretty much all fighting units had been dispersed and routed, but managed to reassemble fairly fast), the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not, and collapsed three days before the end of the battle (and two after begging for an armistice). Furthermore, the terms of the armistice (that included free passage to Germany through Austria) forced the German Empire to ask for armistice, as the plan to fight through the winter to get favourable peace conditions had been shot to hell by the threat of a million battle-hardened soldiers from the South.
• The war in general was one to the Ottoman Empire, whose centuries long dominion came to a sudden and violent end. The few exceptions were the Gallipoli Campaign (largely thanks to incompetent leadership by the British and the brilliant genius of Mustafa Kemal) and the humiliating British surrender at the Siege of Kut. The following Armistice of Mudros effectively ended the Empire as anything other than a rump state and the Treaty of Sevres would have been the final blow.
  • However, the Turkish War of Independence that came about as a result of the Treaty of Sevres (which was considered so harsh, the Turkish revolutionary government literally kicked the Ottoman delegation that signed it out of citizenship and the treaty was never ratified) ended up being one for Greece. The war exhausted Anatolian population, again thanks to the political and military brilliance of Mustafa Kemal, defeated a superior force deployed by Greece (incompetence and disconnected leadership was once again a factor, at the last offensive the Greek corps commanders General Kimon Digenis and General Nikolaos Trikoupis only learned that Trikoupis was appointed as army commander while they were prisoners of war after general Georgios Hatzianestis was fired during the battle). The Trial of the Six after the Armistice of Mudanya saw those the Greek government saw responsible (including Hatzianestis) be sentenced to death (alongside other prison sentences to others), with Prince Andrew's death sentence being replaced by life in exile. Prince Andrew and his family, including his son Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh and husband to Queen Elizabeth II, escaped on British cruiser HMS Calypso. Greece suffered from instability until World War II.

World War II

• The Battle of Midway became this for the Japanese, as their loss in the battle effectively halted their expansion and put them fully on the defensive for the first time. US Naval Supremacy was only a matter of time, however; the Empire couldn't stay lucky forever in the face of the Allies' overwhelming economic and industrial superiority.
  • In a sense, the Doolittle Raid counts as well. After Pearl, the Japanese appeared invincible, seizing island after island and colony after colony. By April 1942, they had all but swept the Allies from the Pacific. Then, sixteen B-25s were transported by carrier a few hundred miles from Japan and dropped light bombs on Japanese cities. Almost no infrastructure damage was inflicted, but it scared the crap out of the Japanese. This drove Admiral Yamamoto to fight much more aggressively, causing him to attack Midway in order to secure it and thus the Japanese defense perimeter would be complete. Then, at Midway, all four of Yamamoto's carriers were sunk...
  • The raid also had a vital strategic effect. Japan's home defense fleet was very weak, so they recalled a fleet that was heading for the Indian Ocean. This gave the Royal Navy a much-needed breather to regroup and regain its strength in the Pacific.
• The Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941 is widely considered the worst military defeat in US history, with over 23,000 soldiers killed and 100,000 captured, who would go on to face more than three years of harsh treatment by their captors.
• The Campaign for Guadalcanal was this for the Japanese, especially for the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). The first major American offensive of the Pacific War, the battle for Guadalcanal would last for six months, with the Japanese relentlessly trying to capture the island's vital airfield, but to no avail. The battle proved that the IJA was not as invincible as they believed. Despite numerous attempts to recapture the airfield, they couldn't decisively defeat the Americans, much less dislodge them from the island, all while suffering staggering losses. It also shattered the concept that simply having Japanese Spirit is all the army needs to be victorious and destroy their enemies, particularly if said enemy has superior firepower that decimated their forces by the hundreds, if not thousands. Of the roughly 31,000 IJA soldiers sent to the island, only 11,000 were evacuated at the battle's end, with 20,000 men killed (mostly from disease). Guadalcanal for the Japanese has been nicknamed the "Island of Death".
  • The Japanese Navy also was severely affected by the defeat at Guadalcanal, losing more men, ships, planes, and other material than they could ever afford.
• The Battle of Savo Island was the worst defeat suffered by the US Navy in history, and led to a number of operational and structural changes to prevent such a disaster from happening again.
• The Battle of the Philippine Sea, in 1944, became another one for Japan. They had advantages in position, geography, and circumstances (a strong wind that would considerably bolster Japanese carrier attack ranges while reducing the Americans', air bases closer to the enemy to field additional and heavier aircraft as well as land carrier aircraft returning from an extreme range attack on the enemey, etc), and the Americans were in the middle of invading islands that would give America airbases within strategic bombing range of the Japanese home islands. They sent out attack wave after attack wave, considerably more aircraft than they had had at their disposal at Midway, and the wind advantage meant that they were seemingly beyond the range of American reprisal. Only for the Japanese to find out that their pilots, planes, doctrine, technology, and ships were horribly outmatched when the American forces absolutely annihilated wave after wave of Japanese aircraft (this coming to be known as "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot"), with only minor damage on a battleship to show for it. Then American submarines sank two of their best fleet carriers—including the brand-new and pride-of-the-fleet Taiho, and the American counterattack still managed to catch up to and sink one more fleet carrier. The battle completely dashed any hope of the Japanese Navy turning the war around.
  • The Taiho's sinking in itself was the mortal wounding of the Imperial Japanese Navy, the abysmal mismanagement of damage control showing the core of the fleets traditions had began to crack beyond recovery.
• The Battle of Leyte Gulf, following the Battle of the Philippine Sea, was the Imperial Japanese Navy's final attempt to stop the US Navy. With its carrier forces utterly decimated and reduced to being nothing more than a decoy, the IJN sortied the vast majority of its remaining fleet. The Southern Force was summarily obliterated by a perfectly orchestrated night-time ambush, with a Japanese battleship (the other one had been incinerated by a torpedo salvo earlier) being effectively executed by a firing line composed largely of the American battleships that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor (and then raised and repaired). The Northern Force, comprised of the decoy (as in, largely empty) carriers were all sunk by overwhelming carrier attack. The Center Force, where all of the true strength lay, received a golden opportunity after Halsey chased after the decoy force without so much as leaving a picket ship in the strait leading to his landing forces and escort carriers, stumbling upon Taffy 3: half a dozen slow, unarmored escort carriers and a few destroyers^note A single ship in Center Force, the battleship Yamato, was larger and better-armed than all of Taffy 3 combined. that were in the middle of supporting landing operations and were completely astonished by Center Force's arrival. Cue the most mis-matched naval battle in history, with Taffy 3 actually fighting off one of the most powerful surface action groups ever assembled with nothing more than a few tin-can destroyers, planes armed with just machine guns and light bombs, and audacious, desperate courage. By the end, the Northern Force was decimated, the Southern Force was annihilated, and the Center Force had taken severe losses, with only one escort carrier, two destroyers, and one destroyer escorts sunk to show for it. The Japanese Navy was destroyed as a significant fighting force, its remnants scattering to various locations and being hunted down in detail by the US Navy.
• The last gasp, Operation Ten-Go, saw the Yamato and more than half of her escorts be annihilated by air power, ending the battleship for good and the final end of the IJN.
• Japan's defeat in World War II as a whole counts as this. Much of their post-WWII policy (most notably, their Constitution, which is mostly known for its ninth article, renouncing its right to declare war) and culture has been shaped by the country's experience during the war and its immediate aftermath.
  • The same can be said for Germany. The German constitution puts heavy civilian oversight over the Bundeswehr. While the country continues to produce quality weapons and vehicles, the military is seen as a joke by much of the German public. And that's not even getting into the deep-rooted national shame that Germany feels for the Holocaust.
• Britain's 1940 retreat from Dunkirk marked a turning point in World War II, but is remembered in Britain more for the heroic rescue of stranded troops than as a defeat.
  • The "Fall of France" fits the trope name better. Dunkirk is more of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat (although Churchill was quick to point out that you don't win wars with retreats and that while it was great to save the troops, the Fall of France was still a major defeat for the Allies). France had been the major balancing power on the continent against a resurgent Germany; everyone, from the French to the British to the Russians to the German General Staff believed it would be a long and brutal slugging match. When, according to von Manstein's plan, Guderian's XIX Panzer Corps cracked through the thin French defenses at Sedan, there was nothing between the Germans and the Channel, and the grand strategic balance of the war had been destroyed at a stroke. The most powerful army in Europe had been neutralized and their country overrun in six weeks, a defeat which singlehandedly destroyed the reputation of France and turned them into the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys laughing stock of the western world. In hindsight the German conquest of France also marked the end of Western Europe's dominance as colonial powers, with the downfall of Europe's second biggest colonizing power sending out the message that white imperialists were not so high and mighty after all, leading to a rapid period of decolonization as various European-owned nonwestern territories fought for independence in the face of France's loss to Germany.
    • Also, they had to leave most of their heavy arms, fuel, ammunition, vehicles, and equipment behind (which was enough to supply eight to ten divisions), so it would take a while before they were in a condition to face the Wehrmacht in the field again. Granted, much of the equipment was old or obsolescent, but they still had to rebuild from the ground up.
• The failed Rzhev offensive and loss of Sevastopol of 1942 were probably this for the Soviet Union. They were later overshadowed by the great victories of Stalingrad and Kursk, but these failures, which stemmed largely from overconfidence after the successful Battle of Moscow and generally crappy Soviet logistics, costed enormously both in lives and materiel, and later weighed heavily over Soviet morals and military thinking even late in the war and after it.
  • And before that; the Soviets suffered this trope in Battle of Kiev, which was considered by military historians as one of biggest encirclements that ever happened throughout the war itself.
• For the European colonial powers in general, and the UK in particular, the Fall of Singapore. It had been boasted that Singapore was the best-defended city in the world, the armour-piercing shells of her heavy gun emplacements capable of punching through any ship the Japanese had to offer. However, Singapore was besieged from the landward side, and their anti-battleship defenses were wholly ineffective at targeting infantry. Percival had 100,000 troops on paper, but they were in no shape to continue fighting. Realising that their situation was hopeless, he surrendered. Only to find that the Japanese only numbered some 30,000 and their supply situation had been even worse. It was this event (among others in Southeast Asia) that inspired the acceleration of the decolonisation process - the European colonial powers were not, and never had been invincible.
  • Churchill himself felt the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942 was the greatest defeat in British history.
  Winston Churchill:"I put the telephone down. I was thankful to be alone. In all the war I never received a more direct shock."
  • It's generally acknowledged that even had Percival pushed the issue, he felt that Pyrrhic Victory would not have been worth it.
• The Battle of Stalingrad, for the German forces in the Soviet Union. The Sixth Army was one of the largest German field armies, and the battle was soon painted by propaganda as an intense clash of ideologies: Nazism vs communism, Hitler vs Stalin. When the army was cut off, the Nazis immediately put a lid on all media reports regarding Stalingrad. Finally, the last remnants of the Sixth Army surrendered in February 1943. Nearly 100,000 Germans were captured, out of an initial force of 250,000. The scale of the catastrophe was so great that even Goebbels could not camouflage the defeat as he had the numerous other setbacks on the Eastern Front. It was the first time that the Nazis publicly acknowledged a failure in the war effort, causing German civilians to begin doubting their promise of final victory.
• The Second Battle of El Alamein, for the Axis forces in North Africa.
  • Despite the loss and withdrawal from El Alamein, the campaign in North Africa continued for another six months. When Rommel ordered the retreat, Montgomery did not pursue and thus allowed the broken German formations to withdraw, fortifying themselves within Tunisia. The loss of Tunisia occurred only a few months after the loss at Stalingrad, with a quarter of a million troops taken prisoner. Soon after, the loss of Sicily was so great that the Italians overthrew Mussolini.
  • Rommel probably thought he could regroup and attack again the following year after halting the British offensive. What made El Alamein ensure this would never happen was that not too long after, the Americans started landing in Morocco and Algeria.
  • After failing to break through to Alexandria and beyond in the First battle of El Alamein, Rommel would have had to retreat after the American landing in Morocco and Algeria in any case. Some people therefore see the Second Battle of El Alamein as having been fought to a large extent to build up British morale and prestige in a last chance to win a major battle without the American army helping...
• The Battle Of Kasserine Pass. Following the successes of Operation Torch, the Americans were riding high from the victory, but up to that point, they'd only faced Italian and Vichy French resistance. At Kasserine, they rolled up on Rommel himself and his Afrika Korps, which proceeded to devastate and rout the American forces. The major contributing factor in this battle was that America had little experience in armored warfare, so their tactics and equipment was sorely outdated, in contrast to Rommel's veteran soldiers with the most modern technology available. It was this defeat that spurred General George S. Patton to completely rewrite America's book on armored warfare, to the point that even Rommel was impressed when he heard of the improved American armored forces.
• The Night of Taranto during World War II. Before it, the mere threat of the Italian battlefleet stationed at Taranto was making the Royal Navy cower. After a carrier attack neutralized half of the Italian battleships (including the newly completed Littorio, the most powerful battleship in Europe, damaged and neutralized for five months), the balance of power was firmly into British hands, and the Italians never managed to win a decisive engagement.
  • Incredibly and unbelievably Subverted in the Italian revenge for that, the Raid on Alexandria, in which six frogmen with three manned torpedoes penetrated Alexandria's harbour and sank two battleships and damaged a tanker (plus a destroyer by accident: it was too close to the tanker when the mine placed on it by the frogmen exploded). In theory the Mediterranean Fleet had been neutralized, and the Italians were free to dominate the Mediterranean Sea until the battleships could be repaired or replaced... Except the Italian high command failed to find out: the frogmen had been all captured before they could report their success, and the British immediately raised the battleships (sank in shallow waters) and patched them up enough that air recon believed they had not been damaged. While the raid did mark the start of six months of Axis victories in the Mediterranean, had the Italians known of it nobody knows what they would have done.
• For the U-Boat Service, May 1943 became known as "Black May" when 41 submarines, a full quarter of the operational U-boat fleet, were destroyed. While the "Happy Times" had long since passed, and the British no longer made the same mistakes, this marked the decisive shift in the Battle of the Atlantic. The industrial and intellectual powerhouse of the United States was brought into full force, with ships being built faster than they could be sunk and U-boats being sunk faster than they could be built. All remaining U-boats retreated to their bases in France, and the Kriegsmarine immediately began outfitting all boats with the latest technology to improve operations. However, the loss of so many experienced crews already deeply impacted the force's morale, with crews wondering why they bothered venturing out anymore. Even flotilla commanders started to tell departing boats "Never mind sinking ships. Just come back, please."
• The Warsaw Uprising in 1944 was an attempt by an underground rebel militia to take back control of German-occupied territories in Poland and deter a potential invasion by the Soviet Union, who had previously gone to war with the Poles in the 1920s with the aim of reabsorbing the country into Russia^note it was previously split between them, Austria, and Prussia at the end of the 18th century before regaining independence after World War I. The uprising saw little support from the Allies as a result of Soviet interference, and as such, it ended with countless military causalities, hundreds of thousands of mass civilian executions by Germany, and the near-total destruction of Warsaw. So many people died that Poland ran out of gravesites and had to bury people in the streets. Furthermore, the failure of the Uprising ensured that Poland would fall under Russia's thumb again as a Soviet satellite state after the war, with the country not regaining its independence again until 1990.
• The summer of 1944 effectively sealed Germany's defeat. First came the D-Day invasions, when American, British, and Canadian troops landed on the coast of Normandy. The short-sighted micromanagement of the German Army by Hitler caused vital Panzer divisions to not be moved to the battle, allowing the Allies to establish a firm beachhead that soon became impossible to dislodge. A few weeks later, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration, which smashed the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center in Poland and wiped out divisions that Germany could no longer replace. These simultaneous battles shattered German morale, leading them to realize that defeat was inevitable.
  • The Battle of the Bulge was Hitler's final offensive against the Western Front, an attempt to divide the forces of the Americans, the British and the French in the Ardennes region of Belgium, an effort that ended in failure as the combined forces of the Western Allies broke what was left of the back of the Nazi war machine.
• In the summer of 1944, the commander of the Western Allied forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was facing a conundrum: having endured this war for the good part of five years, civilian leaders in Europe were growing quite tired of it, and they wanted it ended, fast, and with as few people killed as possible. Unfortunately for Eisenhower, the only (and best) strategy he had been offered was that of General George Patton's, who favored pushing across The Dreaded Siegfried Line, a massive fortified complex guarding Germany's border, and making a mad charge across the German countryside, tearing up anyone in their way and taking Berlin in a battle of massive attrition; Eisenhower's problem with such a strategy was the "attrition" part, since such an endeavour would likely commit the Allies to a mobile, entrenched offensive reminiscent of that seen in World War One, and which the Western Allies had already had a bitter taste of during the France offenses. With how tightly Germany, which, while severely diminished, still had a significant amount of industrial and logistical capacity to mount a respectable (if ultimately futile) defense, was holding onto its ground, it was not likely to be a bloodless offensive, with potentially massive casualties on both sides—at this point, you can see why Eisenhower and the civilian leaders pressuring him to end the war had a problem with this.
  • Bernard Law Montgomery, Patton's British contemporary, has a plan. Said plan is called Operation Market-Garden, a two-phase offensive consisting of the following:
    • Market: An absolutely massive aerial drop into Holland, in which paratroopers (consisting of an amalgamation of British, American, and Polish regiments) would seize nine bridges along Holland's A50 Motorway, which led directly across the Rhine and into Germany, namely terminating near Germany's Ruhr Valley, the main industrial and manufacturing hub for the entire country. Once the bridges were secured, the next phase would begin, consisting of...
    • Garden: In which the British XXX Corps, an armored mechanized force, would use the A50 and the secured bridges to ride straight into Germany, establishing the northern half of a massive pincer formation which would be co-opted by a southern pincer with a similar operation, surrounding Germany's Ruhr Valley and cutting it off from the rest of the country, essentially cutting Germany's still-beating industrial out of its proverbial chest and tapping the country of its capacity to mount any sort of organized offense.
  • Theoretically, this operation would have ended the war by Christmas, and, on the assumption that the German troops guarding Holland were tired, battle-beaten conscripts with little to no mechanized support whatsoever (as most leaders believed that Germany was sending its best forces to fight Russia on the Eastern Front), the operation would likely be relatively bloodless, with few projected casualties.
  • Unfortunately, this is not how things unfolded, due to...an escalating number of issues. During the Market phase, several regiments missed their drop and were scattered, most notably the British 1st Airborne who were dropped ten miles off their target at the city of Arnhem due to heavier-than expected flak defenses. There was also the unexpected prescence of armored support for the German defenders, including the elite SS Panzer Divisions being held in reserve near the city, something which the Dutch Resistance had tried to warn Allied leaders about but were promptly ignored or distrusted. While a few bridges were taken without incident, others were fought over bitterly, including the bridgehead in Arnhem, which the entire operation depended upon to succeed.
  • And just when people thought Garden would go smoother... it didn't. While some bridges were taken intact, the Germans, having been expecting an offense of some sort in the area soon, wired several bridges to blow, which they detonated at the first sign of trouble, causing heavy delays to the XXX Corps as they tried to reach Arnhem to relieve the 1st Airborne. On top of this, the A50 became a death trap for the XXX Corps' convoys, being shelled and raided almost constantly by German forces still holding out, and earning it the ignominious name of "Hell's Highway". And, just to add a topper to the shitstorm, a major part of the XXX got caught in a surprise German air raid in the city of Eindhoven, which devastated their logistics and, most horrifying to them, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, who had only the day before had welcomed the Allies with open arms and celebration in gratitude for their liberation. Combined with the hampering efforts and logistical nightmare that supplying them had become, the XXX bogged down just outside Nijmegen. Unfortunately, at this point, Eisenhower called it quits, and Market Garden was aborted. As for the 1st Airborne in Arnhem...their relief would not be arriving. Of the eight thousand souls left behind in the besieged city, barely a quarter of those would make it back to friendly lines.
  • The operation went down as one of the biggest Allied SNAFUs of the war, and resulted in casualties and setbacks that dashed any hopes of ending the war early. For Montgomery, for whom the operation had been touted as one of his crowning achievements, it became a black mark on his record (though he was not solely at fault and continued to be a valuable commander to the Allies to the end of the war). One of the lesser known effects it had, though this was not as apparent until after the war, was that it tapped the British of the majority of their frontline ground forces; while Britain continued to support the war in the form of armored, logistic, and aerial support, it would be the Americans and Canadians who would have the lion's share of infantry power in Europe until the war's end.

Vietnam War

• In the prelude to the US involvement in Southeast Asia, the French attempted to reclaim control of their colonies in the area after World War II ended. Unfortunately their shockingly fast defeat against Germany early in the war shattered the illusion that the French military was invincible, and emboldened Ho Chi Minh's resolve to kick them out of Vietnam as well. Though the French managed to remain in control for a few years, their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu marked the end of French control of the region. For the French military, it was such a major blow after World War II, that they overcompensated in the Algerian crisis and resorted to extra-brutal measures to prove they, a major European great power, won't suffer defeat from weak nations again.
• Vietnam was the greatest military quagmire in United States history.
  • Within the war itself, the Tet Offensive can be considered this. The Vietcong attacked many cities simultaneously, notably claiming the US Embassy in Saigon. This was a major hit to the vision of American strength and hit their morale deeply, especially as nightly TV news had shown repeated US victories over the Vietcong militarily speaking. In reality, the Vietcong suffered heavier losses than the American troops and the attack itself devastated the Vietcong's ability to operate to such an extent the North Vietnamese Army took over operations in South Vietnam, but in terms of perception this drastically swayed the war in their favour.
    • It was one of a few times when a major victory for a country (the US) was treated as a defeat. The fact that the US had beaten the Vietnamese very, very badly during the Tet Offensive was secondary to the fact that the unpopular war was still going on and that the offensive convinced Americans that the war would continue for years at that point. The media did the military no favors in its reporting on the war, and this reporting helped to shape US public opinion. The lesson was not lost on the military, and all US wars since then have had considerably tighter control over what reporters can show.

Other Wars

• The Spanish-American War served as this for Spain. The Spanish Empire had already been in decline for the last century or so, but the loss of the last remnants of their once-great empire came as a profound shock. This sparked the rise of the Generation of '98, a philosophical and artistic reevaluation of Spanish society.
• The Six-Day War was this for the Arab world. Not only had several invading armies been beaten by the Israelis, but Israel ended up in control of eastern Jerusalem (with the holy sites sacred to all the Abrahamic religions), the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. The fact that a small, outnumbered, and surrounded country could do this was considered a disaster by the Arabs. However, in the 1973 war, the Arabs (especially Egypt) gave a better account of themselves; while the Israelis managed to maneuver themselves into superior positions during the late stages, it could no longer inflict another catastrophe as the Six-Day War on their enemies, lessening the legacy of that defeat. Israel eventually returned the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt, though it still keeps the other areas.
  • In the longer term, the Six-Day War has had a major repercussion on the Arab world's position regarding Palestine. Before the war, the Arab world was relatively united in its support of Palestine, thanks mainly to the efforts of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Afterwards, the support is more lukewarm, especially those from the wealthy Gulf Arab countries, which began to see the whole matter as a lost cause and frankly worthless (on account of the conflict's remoteness from their perspective and their interests lying more on trading with fellow rich countries than politics). A few countries even decided to make peace with Israel and exchanged ambassadors, something that would've been unthinkable before the Six-Day War.
• Afghanistan is known as the "Graveyard of Empires" precisely for this reason. Despite being a relatively weak nation, its mountainous, desert terrain makes it a nightmare to occupy and maintain control over, and insurgents are nearly impossible to stamp out. Some of the mightiest empires in history have withdrawn from Afghanistan in frustration and embarrassment, after an easy initial conquest led to resources being wasted on a decades-long occupation. In modern history, for instance, an attempt by the Soviet Union to occupy the country in 1979 led to a ten-year conflict, which was one of the contributing causes of the tottering Soviet system finally breaking down.
  • After the ruling Taliban refused demands to extradite terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, a coalition of nations led by the United States would occupy Afghanistan in 2001 at the onset of the War on Terror, leading to twenty years of costly, unpopular peace-keeping/nation-building efforts termed the War in Afghanistan. Unable to eliminate the Taliban insurgency through military means, the United States eventually sought a diplomatic end to the war by agreeing to withdraw from the country. With their only meaningful opposition evacuating, the Taliban swiftly overran Kabul and toppled the coalition-backed Republic of Afghanistan in 2021, re-establishing the previous state and rendering two decades of conflict for naught. Numerous media comparisons were made to the fall of Saigon, particularly after a photo emerged of Kabul's US embassy staff being evacuated by rooftop helicopter.

---

Miscellaneous

Politics

• Hillary Clinton's failed presidential bids have largely stained her political legacy. Despite serving as First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, United States Senator from 2001 to 2008, Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, and becoming the first nominated female candidate of a major political party, Clinton will most likely be remembered for losing two presidential elections that she was heavily favored to win. Widely viewed as the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination in 2008, she lost a bitterly contested primary to then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who went on to win the general election. She did win the nomination in 2016 despite an unexpected challenge from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and went on to face businessman Donald Trump in that year's general election. While polls were somewhat volatile throughout the fall, a Clinton victory was almost universally expected. On election night, however, Trump won several swing states and defeated Clinton in the Electoral College to win the presidency. As a result of these shocking losses, Clinton's public reputation was virtually destroyed with most pundits and even her strongest supporters abandoning the prospect of her running again. Likewise, Hillary's loss also indirectly harmed Bill Clinton, her husband and former US President, who saw his role as a Democratic kingmaker greatly diminished. Furthermore, her defeat as a moderate Democrat in the general election only further galvanized support for progressive Democrats especially among younger voters.^note That said, Clinton's loss didn't end the reign of moderate Democrats, many of whom stayed relevant by pivoting leftwards on key issues involving criminal justice and climate change. Most notably, former Vice President Joe Biden won both the Democratic nomination and general Presidential election by campaigning a more progressive platform than Clinton while maintaining his life-long moderate image.
• The classical liberal / libertarian / liberal FDP had been in every German Bundestag since 1949 and a part of all governing coalitions from 1969 to 1998 (plus several between 1949 and 1966 as well as 2009 to 2013) so it came as a political earthquake when they failed to make it back into federal parliament in the 2013 elections, especially since they had had their best result in party history just four years prior and no party that lost federal representation once has ever made it back. The party basically retooled itself from a "tax cuts tax cuts tax cuts" party into one laying more focus on societal liberalism and party leader Christian Lindner. While their 2017 electoral results were impressive, some observers say that Lindner's theatralic gesture in letting coalition talks fail with the words "It's better to not govern at all than to govern badly" were seen as both lingering effects of their 2013 shellacking and a possible trigger for a further humiliation at the polls. Time will tell whether Lindner and his party drew the right conclusions.
• The UK has the Portillo moment from the 1997 general election, when Conservative MP and outgoing Defence Secretary Michael Portillo, widely tipped as THE frontrunner for leadership of the Conservative Party after their inevitable loss, unexpectedly lost his seat of Enfield Southgate to Stephen Twigg, a relative political nobody. The defeat all-but-killed Portillo's political career - he would only run for the Tory leadership once, in 2001, and be eliminated on the third ballot, before retiring from politics in 2005. To this day, "Portillo moment" is used as a shorthand for shocking defeats of Cabinet ministers or other high-profile party figures, which Portillo himself lampshaded, saying "My name is now synonymous with eating a bucketload of shit in public."
• While British prime minister David Cameron had long been a contentious figure, especially among the British left, the "leave" verdict of the 2016 Brexit referendum destroyed his standing among his supporters and shredded up all hopes of maintaining his goodwill among the British right. Cameron had opened the referendum as a publicity stunt and fully expected it to end in favor of Britain staying in the European Union; however, his failure to properly acknowledge growing discontent with the EU among right-wing Britons in light of the Euro crisis and the Union's controversial handling of the then-ongoing migrant crisis caused his shock at the "leave" verdict to make him look oblivious to crucial matters of international politics, resulting in Cameron ignobly stepping down as Prime Minister and being replaced with Theresa May. Cameron's public embarrassment has since acted as an albatross around the neck of the United Kingdom as a whole, with the country's government earning ridicule from residents of other countries for just how tits-up the whole affair went, and May's four-year futile attempt at securing a "soft Brexit" before her own resignation only exacerbated the issue, with both left-wing and right-wing critics viewing May's attempts at a compromise as spineless (among the left for not rescinding the referendum's verdict and among the right for not pushing it forward).
• In Canadian Politics, Brian Mulroney became Prime Minister after leading the Progressive Conservative party to the largest majority in Canadian history thanks to a public that had more than enough of Pierre Trudeau. The bloom started to come off Mulroney's rose in 1987 after the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, a constitutional change meant to formally bring Quebec into the Constitution (most Quebecois having rejected Pierre Trudeau's reforms, despite being bound by them) and problems ranging from staggering deficits to rampant corruption scandals and anger in Western Canada towards what they saw as favoritism to Quebec. While Mulroney scored a major triumph by winning the 1988 federal election and signing a free trade deal with the United States, things quickly went From Bad to Worse. Another failed constitutional change in the Charlottetown Accord, the Indigenous anger revealed by the Oka Crisis and many of the problems from Mulroney's first term all meant Mulroney pretty much had a 0% Approval Rating by the time he retired just before the 1993 election. Kim Campbell took over as Prime Minister, but this didn't last long before the Progressive Conservatives were all but wiped off the political map. Mulroney's downfall led to several results:
  • The Progressive Conservative party, the first one to ever govern Canada, was destroyed. Western Canadian anger at Mulroney led to most Westerners supporting the Reform Party, later to become the Canadian Alliance. The Progressive Conservatives recovered enough to become The Remnant in Atlantic Canada, but the division of conservative votes between the Reform Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives helped ensure the Liberals governed for nearly 15 years straight until the parties merged to become the new Conservative Party, taking office under Stephen Harper in 2006.
  • Anger in Quebec over the failure of Meech Lake led to a resurgence of separatism and a second referendum on secession in 1995, which the federalist forces won by the skin of their teeth. The "national unity" issue hung over Canadian politics for another decade before fading into the background, although it's debatable if it was actually solved.
    • That being said, supporting Quebec independence is a decidedly unpopular position in Quebec politics. The 2014 provincial election saw support for the governing pro-independence PQ plummet after their star candidate proudly declared that he wanted to make Quebec an independent country, and voters ended up choosing the federalist Liberal party that were ousted for corruption allegations just two years earlier. Later on, the CAQ party won the 2018 election in a landslide by being deliberately vague on the Quebec sovereignty question and instead advocating for more privileges for Quebec within Canada.
  • The anger of Indigenous people being ignored at best and treated like dirt at worst by non-Native Canadian society was reflected by the Cree Elijah Harper, a Manitoba MLA who refused to support the Meech Lake Accord because it ignored the simmering Indigenous frustrations. The 1990 Oka Crisis saw Mohawk citizens resisting their sacred lands being converted into a golf course, personified by the iconic image of a white Canadian soldier and a masked Mohawk warrior facing off. The issues of Indigenous people and their relations to non-Native society have only become more prominent since then.

Sports

• The 2004 Dream Team during the 2004 Olympic Games, who were soundly beaten by... Puerto Rico and Lithuania (the latter of whom came close to beating the squad 4 years prior!). And then, worse yet, were trumpled in the semifinals to Argentina, breaking a streak of three straight gold medals with NBA players. The media refused to let American basketball players forget, until they got it together for the Redeem Team run in 2008.
• The 2007 New England Patriots are best remembered for being undefeated heading into the Super Bowl, only the second NFL team in the Super Bowl era to go undefeated until the championship game. Unfortunately for them, they lost the game to the massive underdog New York Giants.
  • New Yorkers proudly dubbed this season as "18 wins and one GIANT loss!"
• The Miami Heat, led by LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, ran roughshod through the Eastern Conference in the 2011 playoffs, defeating even the Boston Celtics and the Chicago Bulls in five games apiece. Entering the Finals against Dallas, the Heat led the series 2-1... before losing the next three games to the Mavericks. It especially stings when you consider LeBron saying that he'd win multiple championships with Wade and Bosh. The media, the fans and the internet never let the Heat live it down after that, and the loss was haunting enough that it sent LeBron past the Despair Event Horizon. (he lead the Heat to the title the following year winning basically every award in the process, but the legacy remains because he left Cleveland solely to finally get a title, only to fail again with a better team)
  • It didn't help that the Heat seemed on the cusp of seizing victory for the series in both Game 2 (which would have severely crippled Dallas' morale) and Game 4, only for Lebron to get a little presumptuous by celebrating with Wade next to the Dallas bench in Game 2, leading to the miracle comeback that was led by Dallas superstar Dirk Nowitzki. From there, the Finals were a hard-fought battle to the finish.
• Speaking of Cleveland, their teams have plenty of this, helped by the fact that most of their notable defeats can be summed up with a single phrase (The Shot, The Fumble, The Drive, Red Right 88, The Slip). Two were even off-field: The Move, where the Browns were moved overnight to Baltimore (to add insult to injury, the renamed Baltimore Ravens would win their first Super Bowl just 5 years later, a victory that Browns fans still believe should rightfully have been theirs); and The Decision, where LeBron announced his departure.
• The 2016 NBA playoffs had two involving the Golden State Warriors: the Western Finals where in spite of the Oklahoma City Thunder opening 3-1, the "Dubs" still won the series (leading Kevin Durant to bail them for those same Warriors in search of a championship ring, reducing the Thunder from a title contender to just a good team); and the finals themselves, where in spite of opening a 3-1 advantage over the same Cleveland Cavaliers they beat the previous year, suffered an epic comeback by the LeBron James-led Cavs (like the Patriots case above, a record-breaking 73 win regular season came to naught as it didn't result in a title).
• The World Cup has at least three finals, 1950 (Brazil loses to Uruguay at home; 5 titles later, it's still a sore point), 1954 (Dark Horse Victory of Germany over the heavily-favored Hungary) and 1974 (Dark Horse Victory of Germany over the heavily-favored Netherlands... though not as unexpected as the previous one).
  • Previously, both the previous World Cup's champion and the host country of the upcoming World Cup were given automatic spots in the upcoming World Cup. Then France, winners of the 1998 World Cup, turned in an atrocious performance in 2002, earning only one draw in three group games and failing to score a single goal. Since 2006, only the host country gets a free pass.
  • 1954 had another consequence for Hungary, which went from one of the dominant football powers on earth to an afterthought, virtually overnight (didn't help that 2 years later, an uprising made some of their best players leave the country).
  • In 2014, Brazil is the host nation, their first home tournament since their 1950 defeat (itself already a Shocking Defeat Legacy). With their new superstar in Neymar, Brazil was the heavy favorites for the World Cup - although it was nip and tuck a lot of the way. They made it to the semifinals, but they had lost Neymar to a tournament-ending injury, along with defender\captain Thiago Silva to yellow cards accumulation. As a result, Brazil gets utterly humiliated by Germany with a score of 7-1 in front of their own native fans, which is both Germany's greatest margin of victory and Brazil's greatest margin of defeat, as well as one of the most lopsided games in World Cup history. While Germany would go on to win the final against Argentina, Brazil would have to settle for a third-place match against the Dutch... only to lose yet again 0-3. This will not ever leave Brazil's consciousness for quite some time. To the point it reached Memetic Mutation, as everyday disgraces (not only in sports!) have Brazilians reacting with "Germany goal!", "7-1 wasn't enough!" and "Every day a different 7-1!"
  • Speaking of Germany, their performance in the 2018 World Cup deserves a mention. Its run in the 2014 edition was stellar, scoring 18 goals and culminating in the aforementioned Curb-Stomp Battle against Brazil. Hence, in the next cup, the reigning champions were considered a dangerous foe. However, Germany would go on to lose against Mexico, then win against Sweden after a match Down to the Last Play, and then finally lose 2-0 against South Korea, despite it being the weakest of the pool, causing Germany to end up last of the pool and getting knocked out in the Group Stage, the first time it ever happened to them.
• The Boston Red Sox amassed quite some in their 86-year drought. The Chicago Cubs's one also deserves mention.
  • Now that the Cubs have finally won their first series in 108 years, the title for longest drought in baseball now goes to the Cleveland Guardians (formerly Indians), who lost the title against the Cubs.
• For most of The '80s and the first half of The '90s the New York Yankees were in an Audience-Alienating Era (relatively speaking for a franchise now with 27 World Series championships), having not made the postseason between 1982 and 1993^note they most likely would have made it in 1994 with a 6 1/2 game lead in the AL East had the players' strike not cancelled the last few weeks of the season. In the '95 season they made it as the AL Wild Card and seized a 2-0 lead in the best-of-5 series against the Seattle Mariners before dropping Games 3, 4, and 5 at the Kingdome, the latter on a 2-run double in the bottom of the 11th inning. With a tempermental owner in George Steinbrenner, the Yankees brought about large changes to the starting roster both from within (promoting Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera up to the starting lineup) and without (trading for, among others, Tino Martinez, who was a member of those '95 Mariners), as well as firing manager Buck Showalter and replacing him with Joe Torre. With a new core in place, the Yankees would win four of the next five World Series.
• Bill Simmons wrote a couple of articles about the Levels of Losing (first article from 2002, second one from 2007 following the New York Mets' September collapse in the NL East), with Level 1 being reserved as the sole domain of "That Game" (Game 6 of the 1986 World Series). Then the Brett Favre-led Minnesota Vikings choked away the 2010 NFC Championship Game to the New Orleans Saints (the batch of emails in the article conveys quite nicely the devastation on Vikings fans' psyche), and Simmons went back and made a list of tortured teams eligible for a loss of that magnitude.^note Note that in the years since the article was published the Seattle Seahawks, San Francisco Giants, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Chicago Cubs have won championships and so would no longer be eligible by his criteria.
• During the early 90s, the Buffalo Bills were the best AFC football team in the NFL and went to four straight Super Bowls, only to lose them all. But it's the first Super Bowl loss that people remember the most. Buffalo had their full arsenal with Jim Kelly, one of the best quarterbacks of the 90s leading his team. Their opponents, the New York Giants, were a weaker team on paper and they were led by their backup quarterback, Jeff Hostetler, who was at the end of his long career. What should have been a sure win for the Buffalo Bills, turned out to be a close, competitive game that ended in one of the most unforgettable, heartbreaking, field goal kick misses in NFL history, known as "Wide Right".
• 1.FC Nürnberg was one of the finest teams in German soccer and could at least at times hold its own on the European stage for most of the time between 1920 and 1968. They amassed 9 national titles in a time when noone could even get close to that number (FC Bayern would not get to that number until the 1980s). Then came the season after the ninth championship - they were relegated as reigning champions. Incidentally FC Bayern also won its second ever championship (after a 1932 fluke). Sure, Nuremberg was both by the paper form of its roster and by some measurables the best ever team to be relegated, but it took them ten years to come back to the first division and they haven't recovered since. And when it finally seemed they could catch a break by winning the DFB-Cup in 2007 they naturally got relegated the following year. There is only one German soccer team club that has managed to get relegated as either reigning champion or reigning cup winner. Nuremberg is that team.
• Donovan McNabb was the best quarterback in the history of the Philadelphia Eagles franchise by almost every statistical measure. He holds the records for regular-season and postseason wins for the Eagles, as well as several other passing records. Despite his success in these areas, he is mostly remembered in Philadelphia for going 1-4 in the NFC finals, with three of those losses coming in games he was favored to win. Salt was rubbed in the wound in 2018 when the Eagles won their first Super Bowl with their backup quarterback, magnifying McNabb's struggles and helping to further cement his legacy as a quarterback who came up short in big games.
• Wrestler Dan Gable had an incredible college career, going undefeated until the NCAA finals his senior year when he lost his last college match to Larry Owings. This defeat would motivate Gable to a tremendous post-college career, including a 1972 Olympic Gold Medal (where he dominated his bracket, not allowing a single point) and a superlative coaching run at the University of Iowa that saw his teams win an amazing 15 national championships.
• Throughout the mid-2010s, the University of Virginia men's basketball team became infamous for dominant regular season performances, only to fizzle out during the NCAA tournament. The nadir was in 2018, when they became the first 1-seed to ever lose to a 16-seed; not even a close loss, but a twenty-point blowout to the University of Maryland–Baltimore County. But just one year later, Virginia went to their first Final Four in thirty-five years, then capped it off with their first ever championship victory.
• Australian Rules Football
  • For the 2017 Australian Football League Grand Final, the Adelaide Crows were heavy contenders for the premiership, but were defeated by a 48-point margin by the Richmond Tigers, who had not won a Grand Final since 1980. This causes a turning point for both teams, with Richmond making the finals again over the next three years, and winning two more premierships, in 2019 against Greater Western Sydney, and in 2020 against Geelong. Adelaide never got over their loss, leading to a very poor performance in the following four seasons that ended with their first-ever wooden spoon in 2020^{useful notes}leaving rival team Port Adelaide as the only club to never obtain a wooden spoon.
  • Collingwood's "Colliwobbles" between 1958 and 1990, in which they lost eight consecutive Grand Finals, including some particularly famous ones — 1966, where St Kilda won their only premiership by a single point, 1970, where Carlton came back from 44 points down at half time to win, and the drawn grand final in 1977 against North Melbourne, where North won the replay.
• In 1882, after England lost their first Cricket match on an English ground to Australia, a paper printed a satirical obituary for English cricket, declaring that its 'ashes' would be "taken to Australia". England captain the Hon. Ivo Bligh promised to "regain the ashes" on the next English tour to Australia. When England won, Bligh's (Australian) fiancee presented him with a small engraved urn containing the literal ash of a burnt wooden bail, part of one of the wickets used in the game. Cricket series (and sometimes other sporting contests) between Australian and England became known as The Ashes.
• Sticking with Cricket, the West Indies Team ^note Actually a composite team comprised of players from various British Dominions in the Caribbean Islands were an unstoppable juggernaut in both the Test and One Day versions of the game, throughout the seventies and early eighties. The team boasted a perennial cascade of fearsome pace bowlers, from Wes Hall and Charles Griffith in the late sixties, to Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall in the early eighties and extending into Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose in the nineties. And they topped that off with particularly aggressive batting greats such as Sobers in the late sixties, Clive Lloyd throughout the seventies and early eighties, Vivian Richards in the eighties and Brian Lara in the nineties. They were particularly dominant in the world cups, winning the inaugural tournament in 1975 and the follow up tournament in 1979. In the tournament in 1983, they reached the finals again and were expected to trounce India. But then India upset them to win their first ever World Cup. And since then, the team entered a slow decline that accelerated through the nineties and are nowadays seen as an average middle of the road team.
• The Atlanta Falcons were always known for their difficulty in finding sustained success and performing well in the postseason, but their performance in Super Bowl LI is considered emblematic of their tendency to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: After decades of ups and downs, the Falcons finally manage to reach the big game for the second time, playing against the infamous New England Patriots. They dominate the first two thirds of the game, and go up 28-3 midway through the third quarter, seemingly putting the game on ice, as no Super Bowl team had ever come back from such a large deficit. The Falcons then committed the biggest choke in NFL history, allowing the Patriots to score 25 unanswered points to the tie the game, and subsequently win in overtime. While many commentators identify the game as one of the greatest Super Bowl games ever played, the vast majority of fans and casual observers simply remember it as "that game where the Falcons blew a 25 point lead." The game is inevitably brought up any time any team gains a seemingly insurmountable lead, and in the following seasons the Falcons developed an even greater reputation for repeatedly blowing games that they should've easily won.